Technology Archives - Page 4 of 9

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Future Cities

Architecture and the Imagination

April 5, 2019 • by Paul Dobraszczyk

In January 2013, a photograph of a projected image on a smog-enshrouded high-rise building in Beijing became an internet sensation because it seemed uncannily reminiscent of the urban landscape seen in the 1982 film Blade Runner. Notwithstanding the negative effects of excessive urban pollution on urban residents, Blade Runner tours are now being ...

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Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire

An introduction

April 4, 2019 • by Max Haiven, Enda Brophy and Benjamin Anderson

This article is the introduction to a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven. Throughout the history of capitalism, debt has been a key weapon of colonialism and imperialism. Examples include the ruinous ...

Art, Research and Action Against Debt’s Digital Empire

Interviews

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

The New School creative writing professor talks about her latest novel, Come with Me

March 8, 2019 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham and Helen Schulman

At the center of the story is Amy -- partner of Dan, parent of the teenage Jack and twins Miles and Theo, and, most recently, employee of Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old geek-savant son. Donny has hired Amy as PR rep and guinea pig for his new project, Furrier.com, a ...

Heaven and Hell in the Living Room: An Interview With Helen Schulman

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Brexit, Dark Money and Big Data

An investigation into the financing of Brexit

February 3, 2019 • by Adam Ramsay

An investigation by openDemocracy into the financing of the Brexit campaign in 2016 has raised far-reaching questions about connections between neoliberal elites, the tech industry and the private intelligence sector. Adam Ramsay, one of the journalists involved, summarizes a story vital to understanding how Britain has ended up where it ...

Media

The Power of Platforms

How biopolitical companies threaten democracy

January 25, 2019 • by Janosik Herder

The 2010s will likely be remembered as the decade of the rise of platforms. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber -- all of these companies have become more than just billion-dollar businesses. Over the last ten years they have started to play an essential role in the everyday life of most ...

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Plastics and Fossil Fuels

Follow the History of Technological Systems

October 13, 2018 • by Simon Pirani

Plastics have a history too. David Attenborough’s magnificent Blue Planet II TV series, which last year jolted public anger over plastic waste in the oceans, focused attention on a bunch of materials that hardly existed a century ago. Output of plastics has mushroomed since the mid twentieth century, on the back ...

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Space Race Remixed

The mythical war between capitalisms

October 9, 2018 • by Sarah Murphy

For centuries we have tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe and images have been vital to that unravelling. At different points in history the moon has been held responsible for insanity, fertility, and even home to alien life. But mostly, these celestial bodies have remained a mere twinkling in ...

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Blitzkrieg Baby

Why Paul Virilio’s critiques of warfare, acceleration, and media technologies remain prescient and essential

September 26, 2018 • by Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka

Chris Petit’s 1979 film Radio On features a striking opening scene with the camera zooming in on a note with the words: “We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun. We are the link between the 1920s and the 1980s.” The line could have easily been lifted from a ...

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Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

Technology in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis

September 20, 2018 • by Conrad Moriarty-Cole

“Every society creates its own world, internal and external, and of this creation technique is neither an instrument nor a cause; it is a dimension… an everywhere dense sub-set. For it is present at every point at which the society constitutes what is, for it, the real-rational.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the ...

Machine Learning and the Project of Autonomy

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From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

A Commentary by Patricia Ticineto Clough

August 16, 2018 • by Patricia Ticineto Clough

In the following commentary, psychoanalyst and professor for sociology and women studies Patricia Ticineto Clough reflects on how her recent work on the user unconscious expands on/differs from Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking essay “Cyborg Manifesto” in thinking about the human’s relation to/inevitable entanglement with the other-than-human and argues that her proposed ...

From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

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Rethinking the Human in the Digital Age

An Excerpt from Patricia Ticineto Clough’s latest book

August 14, 2018 • by Patricia Ticineto Clough

A commentary by Ticineto Clough on her latest book, in which she puts her concept of the user unconscious in relation to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, can be found here. The turns in philosophy, media studies, and critical theory to the posthuman, the nonhuman, and the ahuman befit both a post-national ...